_Antonio da Murano._

Berlin. Adoration of Magi.

CHAPTER V

THE PADUAN INFLUENCE

And now into this dawning school, employed chiefly in the service of the
Church, with its tentative and languid essays to understand Florentine
composition, resulting in what is scarcely more than a mindless
imitation, and with its rather more intelligent perception of the
Humanist qualities of Pisanello's work, there enters a new factor; or
rather a new agency makes a slightly more successful attempt than
Gentile and Castagno had done to help the Venetians to realise the
supreme importance of the human figure, its power in relation to other
objects to determine space, its modelling and the significance of its
attitude in conveying movement. Giotto had been able to present all
these qualities in the human form, but he had done so by the light of
genius, and had never formulated any sufficient rules for his followers'
guidance. In Ghiberti's school, at the beginning of the fifteenth
century, the fascination of the antique in art was making itself felt,
but Donatello had escaped from the artificial trammels it threatened to
exercise, and had carried the Florentine school with him in his profound
researches into the human form itself. Donatello had been working in
Padua for ten years before Pisanello's death, and in an indirect way the
Venetians were experiencing some after-results of the systematising and
formulating of the new pictorial elements. Though the intellectual
life had met with little encouragement among the positive, practical
inhabitants of Venice, in Padua, which had been subject to her since
1405, speculative thought and ideal studies were in full swing. There
was no re-birth in Venice, whose tradition was unbroken and where "men
were too genuinely pagan to care about the echo of a paganism in the
remote past." St. Mark was the deity of Venice, and "the other twelve
Apostles" were only obscurely connected with her religious life, which
was strong and orthodox, but untroubled by metaphysical enthusiasms
and inconvenient heresies. Padua, on the other hand, was absorbed in
questions of learning and religion. A university had been established
here for two centuries. The abstract study of the antique was carried on
with fervour, and the memory of Livy threw a lustre over the city which
had never quite died out. It seemed perfectly right and respectable to
the Venetians that the _savants_, lying safely removed from th